Friday, November 22, 2013

I always enjoy the three days at school during week of Thanksgiving. It's nice to do theme related activities on those days. You can click to read last year's post on what I do with the book T'was the Night Before Thanksgiving.
Another thing I like to do is give the children a turkey riddle each morning. They love trying to figure out the riddle. I reveal the answer at the end of each day. You may click the picture below to download a copy of the riddles.

Saturday, November 16, 2013

I enjoy creating holiday themed activities to reinforce skills we're working on in class. My third graders have been having fun exploring multiplication with area. Next week we'll get into the fluency of facts. I created a turkey color by code for my kiddos that I'm sharing. The children will multiply by ones and twos since we're just starting out with the fact fluency. You may click below to download.

Friday, November 15, 2013

Happy Friday! I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs for Five for Friday. Here are my five randoms for the week.

Our school had a Veteran's Day parade to honor our local veterans. My students wrote thank you letters to a veteran and traced their hands on red, white, and blue construction paper. Their hands were the feathers for the turkey on our bulletin board. I got the idea on Pinterest. You can download my letter form and checklist by clicking on the picture.

We worked on forming linking and action verbs. They filled in mini anchor charts and glued into their writing notebooks. The kids enjoyed the Grammar Jammers video on verbs.

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The children finished their character book projects. They had to identify two character traits for the main character supported with text evidence. They also had to track the character's feelings in the story. The final products turned out great! You can download my project for free by clicking the picture.

One of the good reader strategies we focused on this week was visualizing. The children practiced during guided reading and filled out an organizer from my Monster Reading Bundle. They presented their visualizations and words from the author during book share at the end of Reading Workshop.

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Hi friends. I can't believe it's Tuesday already! I'm posting late for this week's tip, the day got away from me.

I also can't believe that it's the end of the first quarter already. I've been working on grade card comments which can be challenging. I sometimes feel like I'm repeating the same comments over and over. I have websites bookmarked that I go to for word variety. The links to the websites are listed below.

Friday, October 25, 2013

Hello friends and happy Friday. I'm linking up once again with Doodle Bugs 5 for Friday and TBA's Freebie Friday. My class concluded this week with an Autumn Leaf Day. It fit perfectly with our study of plants. Here's what it looked like.......

The children brought in leaves for math. They worked in their learning teams to sort the leaves into like color and recorded the results in a tally chart. They used the data to create a bar graph. We worked on writing to compare in math this week and have an anchor chart displayed in the room with comparison words. The children compared their graphs with someone from a different team and used words from the chart to write comparison statements. Click the picture for this lesson freebie.

I made a guess the covered word activity to go with Photosynthesis. Through the activity the children learned why leaves turn colors in the fall. The words in context that they had to guess were photosynthesis, chlorophyll, glucose, yellow, brown, orange, green, and energy.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

I'm lovin' my class iPad! (My wonderful husband bought an iPad for my class). Needless to say, I've been downloading apps like crazy.The first 30 minutes of the day I work on RTI. The iPad is a great tool for this.